Is it possible to make a fuzzy blanket material without using a particle system?
You can always go in and tweak it more, but this gets ya close.  

I guess, to explain a bit...   

Object info: Random gives a range from 0-1,
so I send that into a multiplier to get the desired range,
then pass it into a texture.  

Contrast on voronoi seemed too intense, so I subtracted a tiny amount.  

I gave it a bit of subsurf to make it look soft, but then it looked oversaturated,
so I used the HSV node to dim the saturation slightly there.